The workshop title is obviously alluding to both the latest round of curriculum change and the matter of climate change. To summarise my views, the reduced National Curriculum 2014 need not be a problem so long as we continue to make and share professional decisions about what we do and why. Secondly, no-one in government ever said we couldn’t ‘do’ climate change. The very idea of avoiding such an important issue is absurd. So, let’s reclaim the school curriculum.

I wrote posts on this in April 2013 and June 2013 and, in fact, tension was anticipated in the post on my workshop at the GA conference in April 2012.

Update: 2015

“The Government is very supportive of opportunities being made available to schools in England to incorporate education for sustainable development (ESD) into their teaching but believes that schools themselves are best placed to make decisions about how they do this. In our recent review of the national curriculum, one of our key aims was to give teaching professionals more autonomy to decide what and how to teach.”